Using the Digital Context to Overcome Design Fixation: A Strategy to Expand Students’ Design Thinking

Design fixation has been described as a lack of flexibility in relation to a limited set of design ideas. This study empirically sought to use different strategies to overcome various forms of design fixation. As strategic approaches to negating design fixation, a digital world that has no physical limitations was selected as a thinking expansion motif and an abstract task was given as a design problem. It was anticipated that combining limitlessness of the digital world with an abstract design task would break design fixation, leading to a creative design process. The results supported the usefulness of the adopted strategies. The combination of the digital context and the design task overcame participants’ design fixation and encouraged the creative design process by generating thinking expansion. Further, combining ‘Team Based Learning’ and an ‘abstract design task in a digital context’ led to natural brainstorming and problem solving that exhibited co-evolution. In conclusion, the digital context is one of promising strategies that could be used as a thinking motif to expand students’ design thinking and promote ‘creativity’ in education.